And then there were none …….

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Those familiar with murder mysteries may have heard of Agatha Christie, one of the more renowned female authors of the last century. She wrote a book based on a poem, “Then there were none” in which people on an island were murdered one by one.

Question: How is the suspense of people dying related to VoIP sales?

Answer: That is what I feel about my VoIP wholesale customers right now!!

One by one they are dying. The lack of wholesale minutes on my panel is like the death of people of the island; each day the death of one is like a blow that resounds with the echo ………. “who will be next on the chopping block….”

Our VoIP routes work. That is not an issue. Oh no, my customers are unique. Unique with A Capital U. They come up with tech issues that I thought as a VoIP wholesale salesperson I would not have to think about. But no, oh no no no, they make sure that I become a VoIP engineer as much as a VoIP sales person.

The decreasing VoIP wholesale traffic trend on my panel had to find expression in a superman imitation, i.e. by jumping off the roof …… or in a rant by on Breezecom’s VoIP wholesale blog. I opted for the latter so that I could continue to indulge in my obsession with the refresh button on my incoming VoIP wholesale traffic page.
All my blogs have a thesis statement, a problem, a purpose, an answer, or at least an attempt to an answer. They explore VoIP wholesale routes and their promotion or give a sales perspective. I guess this blog too is a sales perspective, a sales perspective on the frustration of watching traffic dwindle.

The Trauma of Transfer

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Snow White had a step mother who drove her out of her house. Cinderella’s mom made her do all the sweeping and the cleaning. The step mother in Hansel and Gretel convinced the father to leave them in the forest to starve. Moral of the story, step relations do not get along.

This is the VoIP story of step customers.

In VoIP sales and buying, customers come and go. Similarly, wholesale VoIP account managers often find themselves saddled with customers that were previously handled by someone else. Since each VoIP wholesale account manager has his own style, his own bonding, his own relationship with their individual customers, a shuffle causes friction similar between step children and parents.

Be it the impression of competitive VoIP rates that their old account managers gave or be it easy credit terms, old customers with new account managers have the step mother syndrome, i.e. no matter how caring or concerned the new account managers are, the customer is convinced that the old one was a VoIP fairy god mother.

With the departure of a key account manager in the VoIP wholesale selling department of Breezecom, the shuffling of customers has caused much grief, trauma, and the resultant biting down of fingernails.

With inboxes of the VoIP wholesale department flooded with emails, various account managers struggled to placate customers who seemed to miss their own VoIP account manager most acutely. And as much as Breezecom prides itself on the tactfully handling of its VoIP wholesale and VoIP retail customers, new account managers were at lost as to how to handle customers that refused to listen to reason.

But bafflement has an expiration date. A rough weekend for many has passed with this week seeing better customer relations as old customers settle down with new account managers. The peak of the teething process is over with customers calmed down with more competitive VoIP rates than ever.

Learning from experience, this is how it works for VoIP account managers handling old customers:
• Old customers will not be happy initially but it is in your power to change that.
• Calling VoIP wholesale and retail customers to chat, bond, but most importantly find ways to grow them is the first step in making step customers your own.
• If possible, offer them immediate rate reductions to sweeten the deal.
• Show intense interest, follow up on their tts with passion and call and email that at every opportunity. This can taper off later, but it is required early on to make a favourable impression on the customer.
• If the customers continue to complain remind them that the customer is on board because of the quality of VoIP wholesale and retail routes offered, friendly relations with the account manager is just icing on the cake with the pretty girl being the cherry.

Whether “steps” can really be your own is a question of time, your VoIP rates, your VoIP routes, and the first impression of your efficiency. Personally, my own customers are only those who I have gotten on board and grown from scratch. Others with always be others for me. However for some, new account managers work better than old ones.

I guess, at the end of the day it comes down to volumes, minutes and margins. So if big customers are transferred and feel “step”, looking at the volumes at the end of the day can always make them feel your own. :P

Buying Dynamics – The Grey Area

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On hot lazy Sunday afternoons, there is a fluster of activity in patches all over the city of Karachi. These are the Sunday Bazaars, the ramshackle markets that spring up for a day in which goods of all sorts are sold dirt cheap. One might get quality goods at rock bottom prices. Then again, one might as well make a small bonfire of the money spent and watch it go into smoke. It would come down to the same thing in terms of money wasted.

The market for VoIP grey routes market is very reminiscent of these discount markets. VoIP grey routes spring up for different destinations and offer very attractive prices as compared to white VoIP routes; how well they work is a bit of ground work and lot more luck.

The more expensive the premium CLI route, the bigger the market for grey route. This is logical since if the good quality route is already cost effective, there is no point to buy a not-so-much-cheaper grey route and sacrifice quality for a few extra pennies.

An example would be the Pakistan VoIP market. With prices of premium CLI direct route already near its natural price, the grey market for Pakistan route has shriveled into the oblivion it should have never emerged from.

Then there are routes like Philippines premium NON CLI. Philippines CLI routes are in the more-expensive-than-1-cent category. Especially its most popular code, Philippines Smart. Hence demand generated for Philippines routes is usually for its premium non CLI route. To be able to offer premium non CLI routes for Philippines, vendors have come up with an interesting story for Philippines Smart dial codes. Within Philippines, calling from one Smart number to another is free for the first 5 minutes. Hence, vendors within Philippines use Smart sims for VoIP routes and are able offer the quiet expensive Philippines Smart CLI code, for a much lower rate. But as with the discount basements, there is a catch: namely the route is free for the first 5 minutes only. After the first 5 minutes the route is cut off and all that is left are the hellos echoing faintly in the air while the ACD stats show an abysmal reading.

The hunt is on for the no-cut-Smart route. This is a Smart route that is grey but does not have a 5 minute cutoff. Buying’s effort to find such a route reminds me of leprechauns looking for gold at the end of the rainbow. However, our little green men are indefatigable and they have at least found the rainbow. Armed with pickaxes and hammers of live traffic and an active NOC team willing to test all routes at all times, the pot of gold seems shimmering closely in the distance.

Hence in the bargain basement that is the VoIP grey market, routes are sorted through and selected. Sometimes, one finds a perfect fit, more often one has to wade through a lot of broken promises for routes that will just not work no matter how many times they are accelerated to the vendor!

But that is the VoIP grey market, and as long as there are expensive routes available, there will be leprechauns looking for the gold.

The Paradox of Ponderous Post Pay

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There are basically two forms of payment within VoIP wholesale: Post pay and prepay. There are many shades of grey in between, such as prepay with credit, transit credit and so on, but the two opposite ends of the spectrum are prepay and post pay.

To ask the customer to pay first, and therefore to trust us, or to trust the customer and let him pay after usage, that is the VoIP sales question.

Customer obviously prefer post pay, we obviously prefer our customer to prepay us. Talking to team members that have newly received post pay customers, I discussed prepay and post pay customers.

Trust:

According to one account manager, it is not about traffic volumes, it is about trusting customers enough to extend credit. It is not about individuals, it is about organizations in the sense that an organization is not likely to get up and leave with a debt of thousands of dollars. However, exceptions are made for customers who are personally known to the top hierarchy of our management.

Talking to the post pay team, there were dissenting opinions against one-shows. It was felt that even if the customer was well known and had been working with us for some time, it increased risk levels to unacceptable. As my ex-boss said “I wouldn’t even trust my uncle in VoIP!”. Others however felt that many VoIP businessmen had been in the field a long time, with high traffic volumes, but without proper set ups. Personally known to Breezecom, these VoIPers deserved the trust of credit.

Keeping that in mind, the stringent standards set by Breezecom do contravene the risk factor of extending credit to one man shows. Audited financials given the company a good idea of whether the customer is capable of paying back what he owes.

But in the end, ability to pay does not guarantee that he will actually pay, and post pay comes down to trust.

The credit game – volumes vs. risk:

To build volumes, extending credit is a must. Since that increases risk of default, the balance of scales is between building volumes but at a risk of losing out on the payment.

According to one account manager “it’s a credit world. You have to lose some to win some”.

From personal experience I know that it is difficult, if not nearly impossible, to build traffic without extending some amount of credit. Hence the higher the risk, higher the pay out.

Initial Investment:

The initial challenge lies in bringing a post pay customer on board. Where a prepay customer can come on board in a matter of days with a little encouragement from the account manager, post pay requires weeks of follow ups, emails, background checks, and meetings with finance, strategy and the top hierarchy. A pre-contractual prepay customer comes on board with almost no paperwork whereas a post pay customer requires enough to paperwork to fill a binder!

Thus the initial investment of time in a post pay customer is much higher than a prepay customer. Where an account manager brings 3 to 4 prepay customers on board in a month on average, a post pay customer is brought on board on the average of one every two months.

Paradox of Ponderous Post pay:

Though post pay customers are ponderous to bring on board, in the longer term they require less maintenance.

There is no need of constant harassment to cough up a payment. Their traffic is less sticky and less inclined to move at the slightest inclination of lower rates elsewhere. Also, all post pay customers are old hands at the VoIP game. They are professionals, usually with experienced NOC teams and hence do not send abusive emails to NOC if a single call goes awry. Regarding rates, routes and following the set SOP, they are more cooperative.

The paradox lies in the difficulty of assessing a customer worthy for post pay and the risk undertaken, compared to the ease of maintenance.

In the opinion of the account managers currently handling prepay and post pay customers both, post pay customers are more lucrative in the long run and hence should be encouraged. To counteract the risk, the initial analysis should be strong enough to tip the balance of scales in favour of trust rather than higher default risk.

Horrendous Honduras

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In every introductory mail I send as a VoIP wholesale sales executive of Breezecom, I start of with “our core routes are Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh”. In the next line I mention our plethora of other destinations that include Nepal, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Phillippines and many others. Each destination is the heart and joy of the specialist VoIP buyer that it belongs and each specialist VoIP buyer puts in all his sweat and blood building up the destination.

In a tribute to their efforts which the ever decreasing routes rates with ever increasing route quality show for each destination, I am dedicating a series of articles to the buying team that has made the VoIP wholesale’s teams’ efforts successful.

The first article is on Honduras. Most of our wholesale routes are concentrated on the Indian sub continent and the Middle East. Breaking away from our specialty, we are working on developing Latin American and Africa, one VoIP destination at a time.

The first launched VoIP destination in Latin America is Honduras. The process of launching a new destination involves many steps. Showcasing Honduras as an example, I will walk you through them while emphasizing on the level and quality of research required prior to launching a new VoIP wholesale offering.

Step 1 – Exploring the region

The profitability of Latin America came to our awareness first in ITW conferences. These telecom conferences that cater to VoIP wholesale markets are a good forum of discovering latest trends in VoIP but more of this in my next blogs. Realizing the scope in Latin America, Breezecom wholesale route buying team set upon researching the region by listing all the hot VoIP destinations. This was done by wading through pages and pages of forum posts as well as talking to existing vendors and customers. Finally a list of 20 countries was compiled that were in demand and were burgeoning VoIP markets.

Step 2 – Short listing

To enter into the Latin America VoIP market, it was decided to start with one VoIP destination to begin with. To choose that one destination, different factors were taken into consideration:
• Population size: The bigger the population, the more VoIP calls being made.
• Dial codes: The higher the number of dial codes, the higher the complexity in offering them, especially if different codes have different rates.
• Emigration status: For international VoIP calls to be made, the country would have to have a high percentage of the population abroad so that there will be a demand to call home.
• VoIP penetration: There should be an existing VoIP infrastructure that would facilitate the buying and selling of routes.
• Grey vs. White routes: Another factor was whether the VoIP demand was for Wholesale routes or Premium CLI routes.
• Billing: A lot of Latin America countries’ VoIP wholesale billing system was not 1/1, i.e. being charged per second, rather, it was per minute. Per minute billing required a different finance infrastructure within the company since our automated system was second based.
Step 3 – Decision Time
Although the hot VoIP destinations for Latin America were countries like Brazil, Honduras was selected as our first Latin America VoIP destination. Keeping the above factors in mind, Honduras seemed the best choice since it was a small country with a limited number of dial codes yet it has a high emigration pattern. Furthermore, its billing system was 1/1. There was VoIP demand along with an existing VoIP infrastructure, while its high rates made it a profitable venture. The high rates also nudged us in the direction of Premium NON CLI route offering, rather than a Premium CLI route.
Horrendous Honduras:
After all the efforts and research, Honduras has been termed horrendous.

Why?

It’s the vicious loop of every destination. For us to generate demand on a route, the rate must be competitive. For the rate to be competitive, we must have live traffic to entice our vendor to give us competitive rates. And hence the vicious cycle.

Since our other developing destinations are Middle East and Asia based, our existing core routes support it. Our vendors offer us competitive routes since we have high volume traffic for other destinations we are buying from them. Our customers can give us live traffic since they have some traffic for these routes, even if it is not high volume.

But Honduras is starting from ground zero without having anyone in or close to the country’s route we are selling. And though VoIP is a shining example of how small and global our world is, proximity to the country does influence the competitiveness of the rate.

So while we continue to work on Honduras, it remains a tough destination to work with. A horror for the buying expert and a hurdle for the selling team, Honduras remains a challenge that we are determined to conquer.

We Love Our Customers :P

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As VoIP wholesale account managers we all deal with different nationalities across the board. There are different personalities that have different perceptions about the account managers that are representatives of their customers or vendors. Their perception of what is due to us of course affects their behavior towards.

Talking to the VoIP wholesale buying and sales team, I profiled the least loved customers and vendors that different account managers have dealt with over the years, the ones who stood out in their memory due to their, let me use a euphemism here, unique personalities.

1)      Frauds

Naturally anything is olerable than a trusted customer who defaults. Almost all of us have battle scars, some of a few hundred dollars, others of thousands of dollars. “Never trust anyone, no matter how old a customer he is, no matter how genuine the documents seem,” said one account manager cringing when he remembers the recent blow he suffered. However, all the account managers have favourite and not-so-favourite customers to whom credit is extended from time to time, officially and unofficially. Extending credit and taking calculated risks is part of the VoIP business, it is up to the sagacity and the efficiency of finance to keep risks under checks. Despite all efforts, defaults take place, making customers who are frauds, the most detested category.

2)      Unresponsive

All of us have gotten a cold shoulder from time to time, be it a friend, a loved one, or an acquaintance. But the number of cold shoulders a VoIP sales account manager gets in a week is far more than what a person generally gets in a lifetime! There are potential leads, test accounts, dead customers, even live customers, who refuse to acknowledge our existence. As one account manager talks of her current active customer “He has become deaf and blind!” as he refused to answer any question regarding routes and rates via any mode of communication. Whereas the reasons for dead customers and potential leads has been discussed in my blog “The Case of the Vanishing leads,” the unresponsiveness of current customers remains to be explained and will fuel a future blog. :P

3)      Discriminatory

Ever come across people with holier-than-thou attitude? How about VoIPers that talk piety and morality more than VoIP? Yes, there are such people who recommend girls with MSN display photos to cover their faces. Men who recommend female sales persons to remove themselves from a field in which, heavens forbid! they have to talk to males. I cannot comment on such people, it would hardly be fit to be read. Passing them on to male salesperson, with the advice to criticize the said female sales person in an effort to bond with the customer, has been my practice and is my advice.

4)      Communication Deficiency Cases

With such a wide range of people working in the VoIP field, there are always some communication barriers. Account managers repeating themselves on their mobiles with their heads clutched in their hands is a common sight. Some account managers prefer to deal with customers without language barriers but very few actually have the option to do so. In such cases, keeping a glass of water, aspirin, and patience handy is the only real solution.

5)      Abusive

To be honest, I expected his category to be ranked number two at least. But whereas no one likes abusive customers, most admitted that either they had not met such customers, or that this is just part of the business. There have been cases where lines are crossed, such as one horror story in which the customer abused the technical support team with such colourful and inventive language that the tech team refused to share the conversation, even with the account manager! Kudos goes to the account manager for handling it so well as to have the customer polite to everyone now. Her secret? She just refused to do business with him till he mended his ways and since we have the best VoIP routes and the most competitive wholesale VoIP rates in the market, he had to comply.

That we love our customers may be a sarcastic statement, but while we all have our horror stories, we also have customers who, despite all the ups and downs, we like and trust. Customers who support us when we are not meeting our targets and who remain patient when things go wrong. Such customers have our respect and our gratitude and in some cases are favour, such as extending credit and giving more competitive rates than what their traffic justifies.

Hence even beyond the basic rules of courtesy, it makes simple business sense to manage good relations with your account managers. It still amazes me that there are people who do not seem to understand that. Through rudeness one may miss out on good deals, competitive rates, cooperation and other facilities. Yet such people exist and though this blog is more of a rant than offering advice, it also serves as reminder for people to follow the common courtesies of life.

Occasional Madness: We love our finance!

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So Eid was crazy.

In “Occasional Madness: Capacity” I talked about the high volumes of VoIP traffic we routed through Eid days, the difficulties we faced and the measures we took to circumvent those difficulties.

With all those customers wanting to divert us VoIP traffic worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, the issue we faced was of payments. Whereas we could and we did extend credit to a few select customers with whom we had good relations with, to take the risk of default worth hundreds of thousands of dollars would have been just plain stupid.
According to the head of our finance department who has had years of experience in VoIP, the highest number of defaults from VoIP call terminations happen around Eid time which further made the account managers wary of extending credit that could potentially flush future commissions and salaries down the drain.

While small and big business VoIP customers were clamouring to pay, the problem lay in the non availability of finance personnel to confirm payments and add them on the customer management panels. This was resolved by the unswerving loyalty and dedication of the finance team towards Breezecom, which prompted them to be available throughout the Eid holidays.

A different member of the Breezecom finance team was available at select hours during each day of Eid vacations to verify payments. Customers were requested to manage payments and traffic in a manner to enable finance to continue verifying payments during evening hours. For high volume VoIP customers and urgent payment confirmations, the head of finance was personally available to confirm payments and coordinate with account managers to maintain a smooth flow of traffic.

Whereas the issue of confirming payments was resolved through the team work and efforts of the finance team, a primary problem remained in banks being closed for Eid holidays as well. No matter how available or efficient the finance team is, if the payments do not hit the account, there is nothing to verify!

Part of the problem was resolved by discussing it over with our high volume VoIP customers who were requested to make big payments before the banks closed down, while the account managers worked with finance to set credit limits for them as well.
The remaining problem was resolved by our system of UAE cash deposits that enabled many of our small business VoIP customers to pay, while PayPal, Western Union and EMS payment options facilitated our customers in Europe and America. Having a bank in Hong Kong also facilitated the transfer of funds to our account.

Hence, not only were our customers provided with capacity and quality through the madness that was Eid, we also ensure that all the VoIP resources that we offer to our customer – be it our 24 hour service of the VOIP technical support team, the ever present and helpful account managers, or our finance team – are available no matter what the season or the occasion.

Occasional Madness: Capacity

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Special occasions provide pleasant interludes, breaking up mundane schedules while offering a break from hectic lifestyles. Be it Eid in Muslim countries or Christmas in the West, it’s a time to not go to work and call up friends and family to wish them season’s greetings which has become so easy with cheap international calls.

This is where VoIP services providers such as ourselves, come in.

Since our main wholesale routes are concentrated on the Indian sub continent and the Middle East, we had a staggering amount of wholesale minutes on the first few days of Eid. From personal experience I can say that calling within country required more patience than visiting a truck load of relatives and sitting through the inevitable family bickerings! Given the condition of intra-country calls, it required a lot of expertise and forward planning to ensure a smooth flow of VoIP minutes during the peak days when traffic more than tripled. Initial stages of planning started as early as the previous year’s Eid, as mistakes of previous years’ ensured better management in the future, especially for our top three wholesale routes for VoIP call termination: Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

Forecasting trends from past years helped form an estimate of the amount of traffic expected and then take measures to ensure capacity. For this purpose, different switches were set to entertain two of our top routes: Pakistan and India.
By having a separate switch not only was our main traffic flow smooth, lower volume destinations benefitted as well since they were not squeezed out to make room for high volume traffic flows.

While in the months preceding Eid, there was crazy competition over VoIP rates to lock in customers for Eid traffic regardless of available capacity, Breezecom concentrated on maintaining quality for existing customers.

Pakistan:

While the VoIP rates war for Pakistan and other destinations waged furiously, the buying team and directors were adamant on not providing more capacity than available with us.
True enough, the rates available in the market were lower than ours but those rates were dependent on a very limited number of vendors. With our 12 level deep routing for Pakistan, we were prepared to cover costs, even sell at a loss, but to maintain capacity. As a result, though we were on lower LCR for customers, we got the bulk of the traffic since there first LCRs collapsed due to the pressure for volume.

Bangladesh:

Where VoIP wholesale capacity for India is relatively easy to arrange, capacity for Bangladesh requires a lot more effort due to the lack of telecom infrastructure there. With its entirely Muslim population, high volume traffic over Eid was expected amid severe VoiP call termination capacity constraints. In such a scenario the buying department dealt with the looming capacity crunch by restricting rate reductions and doubling the number of vendors in the pool.

BTCL increased capacity and reduced rates in the months before Eid, putting downward pressure on prices. However, we did not indulge in the price competition that ensued and focused on getting commitments from VoIP wholesale vendors regarding capacity during peak traffic days.

The buying team and our NOC continued working over the Eid holidays. While NOC replied to trouble tickets and maintained quality, buying team worked to increase immediate capacity on an urgent basis. SInce capacity was increased at very short notice, it was done at the cost of sacrificing margins. A sacrifice well worth customer satisfaction.

India:

Capacity from vendors for India is available in the market, however high volume traffic by other destinations crowd ports for India out on our main switch. To resolve this issue, a separate India only switch has been set up to route through India traffic.
While all new customers are directed to the new India switch, old customers were used to sending VoIP wholesale traffic to the ip that they was giving them exemplary quality and hence were reluctant to route traffic to the new switch. The preparation for India for Eid was to convince those customers to load balance, to have them trust the new switch and hence divert their traffic without wholesale call termination capacity constraints over Eid.

The Madness:

As a member of the sales team, a fun activity over Eid was to refresh the page displaying minutes every half an hour and then squeal with pleasure at the increase in minutes. The sheer traffic of minutes demonstrated the frenzy of calls being made every second. The joyful celebrations of Eid globally were made abundantly clear by the little black rapidly increasing numbers on the screen that climbed every second.

The increase in capacity, which had at several points seemed like wishful thinking by buying amidst frustrations of lack of rates, now seemed fully justified. The calls from customers that had previously refused to divert traffic due to rates now almost pleading to ensure capacity for them, was nothing short of triumph. The challenge then lay in facilitating their payments while all banks and offices across Muslim countries were closed.

But that is another story. :)

Selling Sales Personalities

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In my previous blog, “The Mystery of the Vanishing Leads”, I discussed why strong leads disappear in the middle of negotiations when dealing in VoIP wholesale routes. The upshot of my research was that when rates and routes are the same as a potential customer’s existing vendors, it is personality that carries through for selling VoIP routes.

This prompted me to identify the different sales personalities that exist in this sip termination business and their success rate, based on the buying team’s response of whether they would buy routes from such a person or not.

Ranking from the most successful to the least, the following personality types emerged as the most successful ones.

1) Flirtatious

Yes, flirting works if you are a girl. Or to use a euphemism, being very friendly and having a pretty display picture can prompt a male vendor to buy. 57% of the buying team accepted that they preferred to buy from girls that flattered them and were good looking. On the flip side, if a male tries to flirt with a girl to get her on board as a customer, this can result in block and delete on MSN.

2) Arrogant

Contrary to popular belief, the customer is NOT always right. Interestingly 42.85% of the buying team said that arrogance impressed them since it signals that there is a reason for the person selling routes to be arrogant. Arrogance is seen as a measure of how good the product is. Of course, arrogance carried to pointless conceit is counterproductive but a strong personality, laying down the ground rules and mostly having a I-don’t-need-you-attitude seems to work well. On other hand, in the clash of egos and personalities, it can also anger a high volume customer into disregarding even competitive rates.

3) Laid-back

Surprise Surprise, sales people CAN afford to be laid back. 28.5%, that is more than 1 in every 4 people you approach, will still work with you even if you reply late. Over here there is a cultural divide that needs to be acknowledged. In some cultures, there is a lack of aggressiveness. Mails are read, pondered over, and then replied and hence working with them allows one the leeway of being laid back as well. Since a large majority of people in this business belong to such cultures, being laid-back can almost be a virtue since you are matching pace with your customers.

4) Desperate

The least effective personality is one that is desperate. Only one person in the buying team said he was willing to work with people desperate to achieve targets. On the whole the consensus of opinion was that a desperate person is not to be trusted. A desperate person will promise anything to get the job done hence it is better to not venture forward in buying routes.

So what sells?

Preferred personality types differ based on culture. In my experience it is better to bond with those from the East and remain strictly professional with those from the West.
A general well rounded personality would be a confident one with swift follow ups but one who knows when to back off. The level of friendliness can be dictated by the lead of the customer. From personal observations, a sales person’s personality matches the customers that he brings on board. Those who prefer to remain professional and avoid idle chit chat bring customers on board with similar traits, whereas those who flirt or bond bring customers on board that enjoy interaction. Hence, what really works is being true to personality one already has.

From manual to automated: a balance of scales

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As a sales person for a VoIP aggregation firm, I use our Virtual Back Office Support System (vBoss) every day. I want to sell VoIP wholesale minutes hence the software I use is just a taken-for-granted tool.

The software that manages data of hundreds of customers, vendors, test accounts and inactive customers, recording every call sent and received down to the second, along with all their quality parameters, is as taken for granted as the sun rising every morning. It is there. A simple fact. Created to serve and be abused when it lags in the business of buying and selling wholesale routes.

I am dependent on it so I never actually analyzed its pros and cons, its balance of scales. However, a little research soon gave me a better perspective.

Example

Let me use an example to illustrate the amount of data tabulated each day by vBoss. All parameters are taken as discreet variables rather than continuous for the sake of simplicity.

For a single customer, we have following numbers against each parameter:
1. ASR = 7 possibilities i.e. 25%, 30%, 40%, 45%, 50%, 60%, 70%
2. ACD = 3 possibilities i.e. 5 – 10 minutes, less than 5 minutes, greater than 10 minutes
3. PDD = 2 possibilities 0 – 7 seconds (acceptable), greater than 8 seconds (not acceptable)
4. CLI or Non CLI = 2 possibilities
5. Rates = 100 possibilities (A to Z rates)
6. Destination Country = 270 possibilities
7. Destination States = 50 possibilities
8. Destination Cities = 100 possibilities (just an example as actual number is far wider)

Therefore, for a single customer who wishes to opt for a single destination, we would have following model: 7 x 3 x 2 x 2 x 100 x 1 x 50 x 100 = 4.2 million possibilities. This figure is for one customer who is demanding one destination country. However, typically we have one customer demanding more than one destination and in fact we have hundreds of customer.

Of course, before vBoss, there was and still is RSM that performs the majority of the functions as well. The biggest beneficiaries of vBoss are the marketing and finance teams. RSM has most of the functionalities, but as members of the marketing team know maintaining exact records regarding usage and payments is one of the most tedious and contentious jobs.

A trip down memory lane

I talked to a senior employee, reminiscing about days when excel sheets were in used in lieu of vBoss.

It was rather astounding to find that on average, half hours three to four times a day were spent tracking the customers’ progress during the day and juxtaposing the usage next to the payment made. That’s more than 2 hours a day, thus 10 hours a week, just maintaining accounts!

This of course detracted from the time from business development. Furthermore, to track mistakes through excel formulas in case of disputes was a head ache that deserved a strip of Panadol in its own right.

However, the employee did mention that though it is automated now, it is a different story that has its own challenges. There is a need for a lot more verification regarding rates to be uploaded through CSVs or through bulk changes. So the time consumed is less but it requires more vigilance.

Balance of scales

As the business has grown, so have destinations and number of customers and their requirements. An online system increases transparency, but its maintenance requires more software effort and extra vigilance without which the company is vulnerable to losses.

The story is a common one of technology. It enhances the quality of services but comes with its own challenges. On one end of the scales is transparency, more time for business development and the offering of a more sophisticated service for customers that is the mark of a well established company. On the other hand, the maintenance of such a software, not only in terms of extra manpower but also in terms of undoing errors since a spread sheet can be corrected by the delete button, but software requires coding by an expert, is pricey to say the least.

Thus the size of the business is the deciding factor in the balance of scales. According to one employee, in a manual system maximum of 20 customers can be maintained at a time, given time constraints. If the business is such that each account manager has several accounts then vBoss is worth its trouble. For smaller VoIP businesses this just might not be feasible.